Many avionic devices have debug utilities built into the avionic devices. These debug utilities can include a trace functionality which enables tracing operation of the software on the avionic device. The debug utilities enable software traces to operate on the avionic device while the aircraft to which the avionic device corresponds is airborne. The data from the software trace can be stored in a memory device. Thus, when the aircraft returns to the ground, the data can be analyzed to debug the software on the avionic device.